Yahoo groups, blogger and Flickr provide the tools by which the group will share photographs and discuss photography. Meet-ups are encouraged e.g. an evening in a local pub to discuss photography over a pint and a bite or a photography trip to London or elsewhere. Group activities include setting members photographic challenges and assignments.

Friday 25 November 2011

David Sillitoe's 24 hour narrative Guardian staff photographer David Sillitoe discusses his approach to shooting this month's camera club assignment

From the Guardian


"A photographic narrative is simply a story told with pictures, and can be journalistic (for example a photo essay), artistic and/or abstract, or simply function as entertainment.
The word narrative derives from the Latin verb narrare, to recount, and is related to the adjective gnarus, meaning knowing or skilled. Owen Flanagan of Duke University, writes: "Evidence strongly suggests that humans in all cultures come to cast their own identity in some sort of narrative form. We are inveterate storytellers."
So where does this leave this months assignment: "Your camera club mission this month is to document 24 hours of your life in six images." This is one of those briefs that initially seems quite simple, but the more you think about it, the harder it is to pin down, and to make some kind of sense of. Of course one could approach this in a simple and literal way; the 24 hours could be documented as a linear timeline, starting when one awoke, and ending with sleep.
As Lee Welton succinctly summarized on the Flickr thread, his day is simple:-
Coffee; Train; Work; Train; Dinner; Bed
Each of these could be an image, and that approach would certainly work, added to which, I'm sure Lee is being modest, there'll be more to it than that!
As an aside, there is no requirement to use the full 24-hours for this, it can be any amount of time you choose. But the temporal approach is one choice of several; an examination of place is just as valid; unless you're immobile (or choose to be), you'll certainly move around within a day. To counter that, it would be possible to tell a story, and not even leave your chair. So, if we dismiss those contrived self portraits which rarely work, what is it that we can actually make pictures of? My 6 images are were made over a morning, where I got up, did some work in my house, and watched part of a scary movie, which to a degree informed the aesthetic of the photography."

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